March Madness, 2K6-Style

College Hoops® 2K6 has captured all the excitement and challenge of a real college basketball season and put it in a format where you are the coach and the players.

More than that, you're the university founders who choose the name, school colors, motto, and fight song for the team. You tell the cheerleaders what to wear. You build the arena and decide how it will look. You are the big college muckety-muck, or hoop-de-hoo as we call it around here. You decide it all. Or you don't. You can also choose from a long list of well-established colleges and universities, most of whom you know well.

Once you know which university you want to nurture, then the meat hits the grill. You're still the one making the calls. Do you do it from the sidelines as the coach, or do you dive right in with the players and puppet the team more directly? The choice is yours.

Coaching just got better.

Begin with a Buzz
From the very beginning, the game puts you in the mood by playing fight songs in the background and showing off new crowd scenes that capture the strange and interesting ways fans express themselves. They're feisty, faces painted with their school colors.

It really took me back to my own college days, sitting on those hard bleachers, screaming at the top of my lungs. It never mattered if you couldn't follow what the cheerleaders were shouting. All you had to do was wave your arms and make noise.

That kind of fudging won't work with College Hoops 2K6, however. You have to know your button pushes as well as you know the game of basketball. No mashing allowed. It will do you no good. Precision button pushing is key in this game.

Doing the wave.

Monster Modality
This game presents you with several mode choices. You can play in Quick Play mode, which pits your team against either a random opponent or one of your choosing. Use this mode if you feel you need to practice your moves. Nothing that happens in Quick Play mode counts toward your tournaments or career.

Pontiac Tournament mode turns up the heat. In this mode, you have the choice of which tournament you want to compete in. You can enter the conference tournament appropriate to your university. If you created a fictional university and team, then you chose its conference. You can also dive into the NCAA® tournament for some March Madness fun and see how your school fares under your guidance.

In Legacy mode, you are a basketball god. You create a coach and use him to build a winning team. Your team starts at the bottom and wins its way up the ladder of basketball fame. To really establish a legacy and build your team into a legend, you have to stay dedicated to your team. You determine who gets recruited and what plays go into the playbook.

You have the final word on everything that happens, until your team hits the court. At that point, fate may play its hand and knock you down a notch. The question then becomes whether you can take a little bit of humbling without giving up, or do you walk away with your tail between your legs?

Spotting the shot.

The C-Word
Choice. Throughout this game, you have the ability to customize nearly everything you do, even the rules. Don't like any of the teams that exist in reality? Make your own. Don't agree with all the rules? Veto them. Boot the loser players. Tweak and train the ones you keep. Do your cheerleaders look sick in yellow? Make a team with different school colors.

Exploring the many potential variations of gameplay and team interaction keeps you occupied for hours and hours, maybe even years and years. Now you finally have the opportunity to prove that the reason your favorite team lost the championship was because the coach failed to put in your favorite player at the final hour. Well, you're the coach now. Let's see if you can do better.

Article by Angel Leigh McCoy